I went apeshit for Melina Matsoukas and Lena Waithe‘s Queen & Slim a couple of months ago, but I thought I’d reiterate for passion’s sake. And ask, of course, if the HE community concurs or what.
Please also read an 11.27 New Yorker piece by Jelani Cobb, called “The Powerful Perspective of Queen & Slim“:
Excerpt: “Queen & Slim is an extrapolation of thoughts that run through the heads of black people each time we’re called upon to mourn publicly, to request justice like supplicants, to comfort ourselves with inert lies about this sort of thing stopping in the near-future. That kind of insular honesty is rare in any kind of art but particularly perilous in cinema.
“This is a film that stands as strong a chance of being hailed and lauded as it does of being denounced and picketed, but it understands the inescapable fact that heroism is entirely a matter of context, that heroes need not be concerned with explaining themselves, and that [the film] — like the characters at its center, like the history it draws upon — stands a great likelihood of being misunderstood. And, gloriously, neither its writer nor its director appears to give a damn.”